Sticks and Stones

My parents had chosen the school. It was just one week before the start of the semester and I, four years old, had never seen the place I would spend another five years at. So, today was the day that I would get to glimpse the campus.

We were on our way to an event, I don’t remember what it was, and passed along Orchard Road to get there. Along the right was an endless fence. Tall, black, with gates at various intervals. The bars were thinly spaced so seeing the buildings was difficult.

The very first day was daunting. I know I must have experienced many new sights and sounds but what I remember most strongly from that humid Singaporean morning was the stench of steaming laksa being prepared for the hordes of giants in the High School.

The experience was vile. The buildings were unimaginably tall, cold, and bleached white from the glaring relentless sun. The teacher had a strong accent, I would only later learn that she was Canadian, which was exotic and hard to follow. Everyone was nervous, everyone felt tiny, and by 3 P.M. (nap-time) everyone was exhausted.

It was an anomalous start to a half-decade that I would love, but from that first day’s experience, I was dreading Tuesday morning 9 A.M., and the start of assembly.

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For those of you not familiar with Aeschylus’ Oresteia (dubbed by Cambridge’s Professor Simon Goldhill the “finest work of literature ever”) or Sophocles’ Electra, and one would have thought that that included pretty much everyone, both concern the story of the House of Atreus, and I would like to talk about each writer’s interpretation of the story. The basic story is as follows:

King Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan War, only to have his head hacked off in the bath by his wife, Clytemnestra, who has since shacked up with his nemesis, Aegisthus, and who is still bitter about her husband’s murder of their daughter, Iphigenia. This act leaves daughters Electra and Chrysothemis in grief and misery, but they retain hope that their brother, the exiled Orestes, will return and rescue them. He does this, killing his mother and step-father in the process.

As is common in Greek literature, however, the two authors have their own interpretations of the common myth, and these idiosyncrasies reveal vastly different expositions of the main themes of the texts. What I would first like to examine is the presentations of the characters of Orestes and Electra, who are the two main revenge-seekers in the play.

Notably, Aeschylus named his play (trilogy, as it happens) after the male, masculine, male, manly, male archetypal hero, Orestes, while Sophocles’ play is named for the female character of Electra. Indeed, while Orestes is the main character for Aeschylus, in Sophocles version he is barely seen, sidelined to brief appearances at the beginning and end of the play, with pretty much non-stop Electra in between.

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Prefab housing should never be sneered at. At time of great necessity, cheap materials easily combined to form a decent standard of housing, were paramount. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA built many - albeit not nearly enough - trailer parks; using prefab techniques to build easily and quickly assembled residences for those who need it most.

As with most mundane and necessary things, someone comes along and decides the idea should be spiced up. From there, a new artform is born. Houses as art is not a new concept: we’ve been decorating our homes and building brand new ones specifically to show off our fine taste. Classical forms used on gated mansions, glass-fronted modernist homes, even Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of the otherwise unassuming brick to great effect are all demonstrations of this desire to turn the home into something more than four walls and a roof.

MoMA commissioned five architects: KieranTimberlake Associates of Philadelphia; Lawrence Sass of Cambridge, MA; Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston of Manhattan; Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf of Austria; and Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee in London to form an exhibition of prefab houses.

Their gorgeous designs use the same materials that go into very cheap homes, but by adding their flourish these architects have turned ordinary boxes into beautiful and environmentally friendly dwellings. The exhibition is open from July 20 to October 20.

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Jeff Buckley was a musician who even after his death enjoys resounding acclaim, not only by myself and Udayan, but music critics and musicians alike. The son of Tim Buckley, a popular folk singer, Jeff released only a single album in his lifetime, Grace (1994) before tragically drowning in 1997 at the age of just 30.

I do not claim to be a music mogul, nor do I claim to be in a position to understand the intricate components which comprise a song. I could certainly never write one despite my (distinctly-amateur) guitarring. However, Buckley’s music was just beautiful. His voice had such an impressive vocal range and sublime sound. His lyrics are pervading, meaningful and timeless. His music is modest and understated. He is quite simply, my only true musical hero.

And it is a shame when you realise that your favourite artist of all time only lived long enough to release one album in his lifetime, and for some sketches and unreleased recordings to be released after his passing. Although I only found his music 8 years after his death, I miss him and wrote this post to share my passion for his work.

If any of you do enjoy Coldplay, Radiohead or Muse perhaps it is worth listening to an individual who influenced all of them yet who is so unknown in comparison. A tragic story indeed; the most talented of musicians who would have had so many great records to offer lovers of great music, whose life cut short when he drowned in the Mississippi on May 29th, 1997. Ten years on, barely thirty songs, and yet his ethereal voice draws legions of new fans every day.

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There’s something truly romantic about the roaring twenties and the ocean liners that gracefully glided across vast oceans to transport the rich, famous, and beautiful from one continent to another. In many ways, the ocean liner - specifically the Titanic, although it sank in 1912 - was the embodiment of the twenties: glorious, decadent, and doomed for failure. As the US sank into depression, fewer people could afford the lavish indulgence of spending weeks aboard a floating palace.

The popularity of commercial aviation around this time signalled a death-knell for ocean liners, which were no longer cost or time effective. Skipping past eighty years of transportation history and nowadays Royal Caribbean, Princess, Carnival, and even Disney are sailing huge malls-on-hulls across the tropical hotspots of the world. While a popular holiday, they have very little in common with the ocean liners of yore.

Despite the fact that cruises are far more profitable than trans-Atlantic voyages, Cunard sailed its three Queens (Elizabeth 2, Mary 2, and Victoria) into New York harbour last night; marking the first time three Queens have ever met. Those there on that below-zero-degrees Manhattan evening reported that it was truly a spectacle: a fine parade of ocean liners, not cruise ships. A simple comparison: ocean liner is to cruise ship as Waldorf Astoria is to Holiday Inn. Economists like to say we are in another Gilded Age; it only seems fitting that three vessels grand enough to exist harmoniously alongside the first Queen Mary should meet for the first and only time in New York harbour; barely miles from Wall Street where today, like eighty years ago, the rich keep getting richer.

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